NV30 in February? Yes, that would be a screwup

The NV30 was late the minute R9700 hit the shelves. It doesn't matter how much Nvidia revised their production schedule or claimed "it's not late", the simple fact is it already IS late because they have nothing to combat R9700. There's really no need or point in arguing further on the matter. Whether NV30 is released in December or February is all academic at this point. If they miss Christmas, however, they lose out on a lot of money.

 

Very true, and I don't think there's any chance that it will be on shelves in any quanity this Christmas. It really is beginning to look like the Curse of 3DFX is alive at nVidia!

 

Actually, HardOCP later that day annonced they had a user with a 4600 running at 50+ fps. As HardOCP states, leaked alpha's are not a good, consistant, reproducable application to use for benchmarking. Take any numbers you see from the D3 alpha with a mountain of salt.

 

Well, as far as i remember the NDA should have been relaxed by the end of the summer, so Nvidia is at least 2 months behind its schedule.

Even if the partners of Nvidia can provide some cards this christmas, it won't be in 10th of thousand...

As for Nvidia-3Dfx same curse, the difference is perhaps 3dfx was not making profits contrary to Nvidia. But who knows?

 

Well the Christmas thing is going to be really hard for them to hit. I feel in order to have any meaning full number of parts on the self in time for xmas they need to start ramping production now. And thats not going to happen. Just remember the bulk of the holiday shopping is done before xmas and you also have the overhead of shipping to your supply channels which always get a little bogged down around xmas time anyways. So nV is really gonna have a tough time to snag any sort of $ out of the nV30 in teh xmas buying season. At least here in the states...

 

Well, 3DFX was making profits before it started missing cycles...... and gave up leadership to nVidia.......

 

3dfx also didn't have a range of other products in different market segments (motherboards, consoles, notebooks, or even OEM deals for the most part). Despite Nvidia being late (this time) they are still making money.

 

Na...NV30 isnt late...it was only originally said to be out in August Of course, that was before nVidia realized what ATi had up their sleeve.

 

and my original point, though as usual we had to argue about the introduction/arrival/launch date to make sure nVidia never make the heinous crime of not executing on time - was that in EUROPE it didnt hit shelves until June, which is still a ong way from 8 weeks after February. i.e. Asia and US may moan about late, but its normally even later in Europe (except for Kyro )

 

Yeah sorry about that

BTW, the GF4 ti 4200 was really on shelves in may (in France at least):

http://www.hardware.fr/html/news/?date=07-05-2002#4820

 

heh no problem really

 

And the next step: they ship Ti4800 and the nv30 arrives late.
Only problem is that Ti4800 seems to be a crap product. If it's true that the only addition will be AGP 8x (I even heard that it might be clocked at Ti4400 speeds) then it's simply garbage.

At least the GF2 Ultra and, 3 Ti500 were hella fast at the time.

 

I think its pretty safe to assume that if the card was going to be released this year they would have said so, anyone looking at their stock today?

Also for the person who stated ATi sold a million 9700's do you have any link to that info? Thanks.

 

IT appears NVidia is emulating 3dfx in this regard as well!

Link: http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/021107/tech_nvidia_earns_3.html

"Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia reported a net loss of $48.6 million, or 32 cents per share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $41.3 million, or 24 cents per share."

Can 4th quarter turn out much better? Yes, in 3rd quarter they managed to increase their market share, but 4th quarter will the first real test of their miss-step regarding the NV30 and ATI's suite of cards.

 

They actually had 9 cents profit for the quarter using pro-forma earnings method. The loss was using GAAP earnings, which includes a 60 or so million write-off for the employee stock options being cashed out (which is actually NOT a cash charge, it's a stock dilution to the tune of ~3%). This shouldn't be a surprise either, since Nvidia announced this way in advance. Though apparently, for certain analysts (like Prudentail) every day is a new day.

 

kid_crisis,

True, all true. However, these kinds of "expenses" and "one-time" write-offs are relevent. I still remember 3dfx's excuses in this regard.

As such, some analysts have downgraded Nvidia to "sell" with target stock values below 10. This is not something that happens if the impact were a non-event.

In any case, I sure hope Nvidia does well in January with the NV30. We all need to hope that both Nvidia and ATI manage to stay healthy and provide us with viable powerful options.

 

I for one am glad not to have wade through all of the "six month product cycle" nonsense anymore--it's really quite refreshing, actually, to see reality come back into the picture and not have to wade through that crap when reading a review. When nVidia first pulled the "six-month-product-cycle stunt" way back when it was running against 3dfx, I said then that this policy was one of the dumbest I'd ever heard of and was destined to bite them severely in the rear end one day... It appears that day has come (although nVidia has by no means kept to the 6-month cycle since 3dfx, this will be the first time it's been 6-months--or more, we'll see--late with a product.)

nVidia has traditionally been aggressive with GPU processes and advanced ram types, but I think this is one time where the gamble has backfired. Against 3dfx at the time of the GF1, nVidia went to .18 microns when 3dfx stayed at .25 for the V5 because of yield worries. Anyway--the gamble's paid off for nVidia every time except for this one. Which does raise the question--how much of the delay is attributable to TSMC's .13 micron process difficulties and how much because of design problems with the nv30? I'm tempted to think that nVidia completely misjudged the viability of TSMC's .13 process and also the availability of extremely fast DDRII ram technology. But I do imagine there were design issues as well.

As far as outfitting the Ti4x00 series for AGP x8, I think this was an unanticipated, last-minute effort when nVidia realized nv30 was not going to make it for the near term and that it needed some "AGP x8" products in the market (you know how people are about higher numbers) to compete (with ATI.) That's why I think they exist at all--making them AGP x8 compliant is no big deal as it merely requires a redesign of the PCB--and not much of one, or at least not one particularly complicated. Something it could do in a hurry, in other words. Basically, the Ti4800, or whatever, is a stop-gap designed to last for a few months before nv30 starts shipping. IMO.